The first phase of the annual Blackboard course rollover will take place this weekend, and Blackboard will be unavailable to users while this work is carried out.

We anticipate that the Blackboard service will be unavailable between 08:00 and 12:00 noon on Saturday 30 July.

However, the service should be considered at risk until 17:00.

From Monday 01 August, you will be able to see the 2016-17 Blackboard courses which have been copied forward.

Brand new modules will also be created in Blackboard at this time, and you will be able to use this form to Request enrolment on a course. Alternatively, administrators in the new Student Support Centres should be able to enrol you on any new courses.

Please note that standard RISIS modules and programmes are being copied this weekend. Non-standard courses such as Shared courses and Non-RISIS courses will be copied on Saturday 06 August.

Again, Blackboard will be unavailablebetween 08:00 and 12:00 noon on Saturday 06 August, and the service should be considered at risk until 17:00.

Please see the course rollover page on the TEL Blog for full details of the rollover process, and for advice on preparing your Blackboard course for use by students in the new academic year.

With an increased focus on academic integrity across the Higher Education sector and regular stories in the press about the availability of online services that facilitate plagiarism, the ability to help incoming students to understand how to write academically is becoming more important.

Turnitin recently hosted a webinar entitled ‘Mind the gap: Helping students make the step up from Secondary Education’ in which two UK academics talked about how to prepare and support the academic writing skills of students entering Higher Education. They have made a recording of the webinar available for you to watch!

On Thursday 7th July over 40 members of Academic, Administrative and Professional staff attended a new informal lunchtime staff development event called APPetite to discover, explore and discuss the use of mobile apps used in Learning and Teaching. At this attendee led event short talks were delivered by several attendees describing their use of apps, followed by an opportunity to try them out and discuss options with others.

The session format:

Appetisers – Short talks by attendees.

Meal Deal – Discuss, try out and ask questions about the apps presented.

Other questions staff have asked

Will links to online reading lists be copied forward?

If you had a published Talis Aspire online reading list for your 2015-16 course, any links to this list in Blackboard will be copied forward to your new 2016-17 course. You will have to go through a very simple process to make sure the links point to your 2016-17 reading list. Full details of what to do will be sent out when the new courses have been created, in early August, and are already on the Library’s reading lists guide for academic staff: Blackboard rollover FAQs / updating reading list links for the new academic year .

N.B. Your 2016-17 list must be published before you link to it on Blackboard.

What happens to 2015-16 courses?

Courses from the current year are not affected at all by course rollover – they may be copied for use in 2016-17, but no changes are made to the 2015-16 courses. You should keep these courses set as ‘Available’ so that continuing students can refer back to course materials, and the feedback they received, in subsequent years.

The only changes you will see are on final year modules, as students’ IT and Blackboard accounts are disabled roughly one month after graduating. This has the effect of making the students invisible on the course, and in the Grade Centre. Please contact it@reading.ac.uk if you know that this will cause a problem for you.